The most important element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is mega-gore. The band’s former rhythm guitarist Jackson Knox gets shredded by a claymore mine planted in his monitor speaker (“It looked as though someone had pushed the guitarist through a tree shredder.”). Ex-keyboardist Brion Hardin is stabbed to death (“Hardin’s tongue bulged out, rimmed with saliva bubbles.”), and the rhythm section is picked off from Lucas’s sniper perch (“It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval…”). Don’t worry about anyone running out of weapons. The former lead singer, Gabriel Stannard, lives in what a thirteen-year-old boy imagines to be decadent luxury, complete with a collection of katanas and an archery range in the basement sporting cop-shaped targets.
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Splatterpunk books had no good guys and no bad guys, only a swarm of indistinguishable jerks dressed in black leather and camo. The Kill Riff’s revelation that Lucas was engaged in an incestuous affair with his daughter proves that the world is all just shades of gray, man. The book makes much of Lucas mourning his wife’s suicide and then gleefully springs the news that in fact he murdered his wife after she discovered the incest. Later, Lucas rescues a young woman from her abusive boyfriend, only to beat her to death with a log. Life is darkness.
The next crucial element in rock ’n’ roll–splatterpunk books is the obligatory authorial revelation of his own impeccable musical tastes through his characters, who congratulate one another for liking the right bands. This is often paired with denunciations of greedy labels, concert promoters, MTV, and sellout bands. Then there’s the mandatory mockery of the Christian right and “Moral Majoritroids.” Some of these denunciations ramble on for entire chapters. In these books, all Bible thumpers are hypocrites who barely have time to attend church between their busy schedules of burning albums, having sex with children, and getting high. But this thin layer of macho attitude—bristling with Uzis, crossbows, leather pants, and cocaine—conceals a surprisingly conservative core. Whether it’s Stage Fright’s dark god of metal who plays the Dreamatron, a piece of tech that lets him beam his vividly imagined dreams into the audience’s minds, or The Scream’s “postmetal cyber-thrash band” that worships Satan (both books 1988), rock was portrayed exactly as it was shown in Christian scare pamphlets. Lead singers were spoiled brats and junkies, hooked on bondage, torture, or drugs made from the blood of schizophrenics. Hell looked exactly like an Iron Maiden album cover. And women were the devil.
Sputtering Out
The first female character in The Scream is introduced to readers as we’re invited to look up her skirt. The second is “all tits and tan and perfect even teeth.” Then she’s murdered. Not even female dogs are safe from being gang raped, and women spend an inordinate amount of time stripping down and hopping in the shower. The authors might have been inadvertently revealing too much about their personal hang-ups when they named the evil group out to emasculate rock ’n’ roll M.O.M. (Morality over Music). But just in case you had doubts, they dub the ultimate evil demon out to destroy the world Momma. She’s a 30-foot-tall, rotting, pregnant, hermaphroditic corpse that eats people with her vagina and has a touching vulnerability to rocket launchers.
Splatterpunk fizzled in the mid-’90s because it delivered too much splatter, not enough punk, but it was shockingly fertile before it folded. The late ’80s and early ’90s spawned an overflowing dump truck’s worth of splatterpunk anthologies and magazines. Fangoria magazine split off the edgier Gorezone, while Fear magazine debuted in the U.K. and soon spun off its own fiction mag, Frighteners.
Graham Masterton dominated the first cover of Frighteners with his outrageous cannibal-kid story “Eric the Pie,” which evoked instant outrage. The publisher pulled the magazine from newsstands, and it limped through two more issues before shutting down. Fear closed shortly thereafter, followed by Gorezone in 1994. Some splatter zines went bust without publishing a second issue.
E. T. Steadman’s cartoony covers didn’t prepare readers for the wild ’n’ wooly weirdness inside. Credit 160
But there were survivors. Joe R. Lansdale’s first serial killer novel, Act of Love, slithered out of Zebra Books in 1981. He followed with a few limited-edition books before publishing The Drive-In and its sequel, The Drive-In 2. Set in a drive-in movie theater that’s suddenly and supernaturally cut off from the rest of the world, these shaggy dog stories owe a big debt to Stephen King’s “The Mist.” But Lansdale is a better writer than a lot of his compatriots, and he wields his down-home folksy drawl like a straight razor. His early novel The Nightrunners wasn’t published until much later because, when he wrote it, most publishers didn’t know what to do with it. A recently raped woman and her husband retreat to the country to heal after the attack, but are tracked down by the reincarnation of her rapist. It’s one part Straw Dogs and one part Texas noir. But the story offers insight into the psychology of trauma that a book like The Kill Riff lacks, offering compassion for its victims, rather than mere high-fives to its cool-dude perpetrators.
TOM HALLMAN
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Artist Tom Hallman spent almost two years courting art director James Plumeri at New American Library before getting his first assignment for a nonfiction book called Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II. After that he worked almost exclusively for Plumeri, learning from his mentor how to make a book’s cover stand out from a rack, how to do more with less, how the strong simple visual statement was the most powerful.
One thing that Plumeri believed with all his heart was that that digital tools could never do what cover artists did using traditional media. But as the graphics editing program Adobe Photoshop gained wider use in the 1990s, Hallman realized this software was going to change his industry forever. Artists like him who learned to use it found that they could speed up production but still be paid their usual rates, allowing them to rake in the bucks. Then publishers caught on. First the rates for the artists fell because the powers that be reasoned that something done quickly should be done cheaply. Then marketing departments started demanding artists to revise finished art because digital tools made last-minute changes easier to execute. Production schedules sped up and turnaround times were cut.
But despite the massive, disruptive impact, digital tools weren’t all bad.
“What’s internal to me is kept,” Hallman says. “And I don’t miss mixing paint. Besides, the way I painted, I’d be dead by now. It ruined my back.”