There was something magical—no, monstrous—about growing up in the 1980s if you were a horror fan. Before we had streaming platforms, booktok, or Reddit threads full of creepy pasta, we had dog-eared paperbacks, spinner racks at the corner store, and library shelves that smelled like mildew and mystery. And for me, horror books were everything.
I still remember the first time I saw a cover by Stephen Gammell on a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. That grotesque artwork seared itself into my imagination like a branding iron. The stories were short, sharp shocks that had me sleeping with the lights on—and yet I kept going back for more. There was a thrill in being scared that nothing else matched.
By the time I was a little older, I graduated to Goosebumps, Fear Street, and then straight into the deep end with Stephen King, Clive Barker, and V.C. Andrews. The covers alone were forbidden candy: skeletons in tuxedos, glowing eyes behind keyholes, ominous houses perched on hills. These weren’t just books—they were portals to haunted worlds, waiting to swallow me whole.
The ‘80s was a golden age for horror paperbacks. You’d find gems like The Howling, The Hunger, or Ghost Story by Peter Straub with covers so lurid they felt like contraband. Horror was everywhere—on VHS at the video store, on cable TV at 2 a.m., and yes, between the pages of paperbacks passed between kids like urban legends.
What made those books so special? Maybe it was the lack of polish—the pulpy, campy, sometimes grotesque rawness of it all. Or maybe it was that feeling of discovery, of diving into a story you shouldn’t be reading at that age. Horror made me feel grown-up, rebellious, alive.
Today, horror is more popular than ever, and I love that new generations are finding their way into the dark. But there will always be a soft (and slightly blood-soaked) spot in my heart for those ‘80s horror paperbacks—the ones that raised me, thrilled me, and taught me to love the shadows.
And every now and then, I crack one open, let the yellowed pages whisper, and remember what it was like to be a kid again, curled up in bed, flashlight in hand, heart pounding, utterly, gloriously afraid.