The curiosities of one of the popular paperback genres of the decade.
'When animals attack' was the title of a popular show on Fox television in the 1990s which featured footage of animals both domestic and wild attacking humans.
In the 2010s, videos of animals attacking people are a staple of YouTube and other online video platforms.
In the 1980s the theme of animals attacking humans found a home in pulp horror novels. Over the course of the decade every animal from the smallest insect to the largest marine mammal rose up and challenged humankind's dominion over nature in the pages of the decade's paperbacks. It was not a new subject, for example H G Wells's 1904 novel 'Food of the Gods' had featured marauding giant wasps, earwigs, rats and chickens, but it had never before featured in so many new books.
Rachel Carson's 1962 science book 'Silent Spring' covered the devastating impact on the environment of the use of pesticides and made concerns about man's environmental impact part of mainstream culture. Inevitably these concerns would be reflected in novels and films. If man was going to threaten the natural world then the natural world would strike back. Alfred Hitchcock's film 'The Birds' appeared in 1963 and firmly established the animal attacks theme. The film features a series of unexplained violent bird attacks in California. Birds begin to flock together and attack and kill people. A new genre was born, environmental horror. Just to show that nothing was completely new the film was loosely based on a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier.
Two very different novels published in 1974 would pave the way for the animal attacks horror novels of the 1980s. 'Jaws' by Peter Benchley tells the story of a great white shark that terrorises the seaside town of Amity, Long Island and the three men who try to kill it. An international sensation the novel would go on to sell over 20 million copies and be adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster. 1974 would also see the publication of James Herbert's first novel 'The rats' inspired by memories of seeing rats in the London suburbs during his childhood. Herbert's novel tells the story of a London overrun by hordes of rats eating and killing everything in their way. The novel was heavily criticised for its extreme violence and unlike 'Jaws' was not seen as a respectable bestseller. It sold though in huge quantities selling out its initial paperback print run of 100,000 copies in three weeks and has remained in print ever since. 'Jaws' and 'The rats' would inspire the two main strands of animal attacks fiction, tales of lone giant rogue animals that would attack any human that strayed into their path and of swarms of small animals or insects that would overwhelm their human prey.
In the respectable genre of the airport novel, 'Jaws' was to a great extent a one-off. Benchley's own successful follow-up, 'The deep', was about modern-day pirates rather than man eating creatures, and the big blockbusting novels of the 1980s would be spy novels, family sagas and crime novels — although Michael Crichton 1990 bestseller 'Jurassic Park' has some similarities to 'Jaws'. The monsters in international bestsellers would be human like Dr Hannibal Lecter rather than animals.
The 1980s would see animal attacks novels find their niche in the cheap paperback originals issued by imprints such as New English Library and Sphere and following in the ultraviolent bloody paw prints of Herbert's 'The rats'. In the wake of the initial success of 'Jaws' and 'The rats', most of the obvious deadly animals such as killer whales, grizzly bears and locusts had become the subject of novels by the end of the 1970s. The challenge for 1980s pulp novelists was to find new animals to threaten their heroes.
This search for novelty meant that all sorts of unlikely species became the subject of what by the 1980s had become a popular sub-genre of the horror novel. Almost every animal seems to have featured, with the exception of the panda and hedgehog — and, who knows: 'Night of the killer hedgehog' might be out there just waiting to be rediscovered.
The influence of 'Jaws' inspired a number of aquatic horrors, but inevitably by the 1980s all variations on killer sharks, whales and even tuna — as featured in 'Fleshbait' (1979) by David Holman and Larry Pryce — had been covered. Novelists had to look a little further down the marine food chain.
Jellyfish can give you a very nasty sting but in John Halkin's 'Slime' (1984) they invade the United Kingdom initially attacking people in the sea before moving inland to rivers, lakes and ponds and even the drinking water supply. The cover says 'turn on the tap and die of terror' as in the novel along with water you may get evil baby jellyfish. In 'Pestilence' (1983) by Edward Jarvis humankind has to launch Operation Chop (Co-ordination & Help to Overcome Pestilence) to save its self from lampreys which have been exposed to radiation, part of a sinister Russian plot to take over the world. Some species of lamprey are carnivorous and feed by boring into fish to suck their blood. In 'Pestilence' they sink their many teeth into humans.
'Click-click-clickety-click' is probably the noise popular horror author Guy N Smith's typewriter made as he churned out horror novels for New English Library throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It is also the noise that his creation the killer crabs made as they closed in on their prey. The crabs had made their debut in 'Night of the crabs' (1976) which was so successful Smith would write another six crab novels, three of them published in the 1980s. In 'Crabs: The human sacrifice' (1988) Smith's giant crabs are dying of cancer, but are determined to destroy Britain's cities before they expire.
Insects although largely harmless do have the benefit for the horror writer that many people are terrified of them.
You may have thought that the only things under threat from moths are your clothes, but in Mark Sonders' 'Blight' (1981) swarming moths attack the residents of a new housing estate. The builders of the estate had used experimental chemicals to clear woodland and the result is mutant moths on the rampage, naturally. The 1980s would also see humankind under threat from worms, caterpillars, maggots and in a 1982 novel by Shaun Hutson 'Slugs'.
Domesticated animals, the pets in our homes and livestock in our fields, had also begun to rise up against their masters. The temptation to portray man's best friend as man's worst enemy meant that by the early 1980s you could have your pick of killer-dog books. In 1981 Stephen King published 'Cujo' the 'Moby Dick' of killer-dog books which was inspired by a Saint Bernard that had frightened King when he visited a garage. King's books transcended the world of pulp horror, appealing to general readers as well as horror fans and receiving critical acclaim.
Richard Haigh novels 'The Farm' (1984) and its sequel 'The city' (1986) were aimed squarely at the horror fan and those whose curiosity was piqued by a novel about killer pigs. In Haigh's 'The farm' chemical contamination turns the inhabitants of Hobbs Farm into killers. Prize-winning Tamworth pigs, geese, sheep and cows go on the rampage and in Haigh's sequel do what any ambitious bloodthirsty farm animal would do and descend on the city.
Richard Haigh was a pseudonym for Laurence James, an editor at New English Library and a prolific author of pulp novels. In the 1970s and early 1980s James would write a novel a month, completing a total of 160 novels that would sell around 12 million copies. James was typical of the authors of paperback pulp fiction — prolific and willing to turn his hand to whatever the market demanded, whether it be hell's angel novels and Westerns in the 1970s, or horror and post-apocalyptic novels in the 1980s.
Despite the many new titles published in the early 1980s, the pulp horror novel was an endangered species. While the world's eco-system was without a doubt under threat from humankind, it was not under such an imminent threat as the pulp horror paperback.
Publishing and bookselling were changing. The spinner racks where you could find paperbacks in newsagents and the small bookshops in working class neighbourhoods were disappearing, being replaced by video racks and video shops. Books were increasingly sold through supermarkets or high street chains such as Waterstones who would not prioritise the sale of books about deadly slugs or pigs. In the 1970 imprints such as New English Library could sell up to a million copies of their most popular titles on bikers, skinheads and rats. The audience for pulp fiction could now rent a horror video or play 'Rats' a 1985 computer game based on James Herbert's novel on their ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. The economic model for the pulp paperback was broken and by the late 1980s they were an endangered species.
Popular paperbacks were now by big-name authors such as Stephen King, Danielle Steel and John Grisham who published one or two big selling novels a year. James Herbert removed the more extreme gore from his books and emphasised the thriller elements, and reinvented himself as a writer of chillers rather than horror novels.
Guy N Smith, probably the most successful of the pulp horror writers, found it increasingly difficult to find publishers for his new horror novels in the early 1990s. He has now reinvented himself as a successful cottage industry setting up his own imprint Black Hill which reprints his 1980s 'classics' and publishes new novels by Smith as paperbacks and e-books. In 2012, Black Hill published a new crabs novel 'Killer crabs: The return'.
Like the mutants animal of the 1980s, pulp horror fiction has had to adapt in order to survive.
