Stephen King – ROBERTS' RULES OF HORROR

Rod Serling’s immortal gift to mankind, The Twilight Zone, will forever reign as the king of television horror-SF anthologies. It will never be excelled. Zone had worthy contemporaries, too. The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents rightfully have taken their places among the legendary, One Step Beyond was available on Hulu for a while, and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller was, until a couple years ago, airing late at night on one of the OTA subchannels.

That the bar for excellence was set so high so early did not deter later generations of TV producers, directors, showrunners, and writers. Many in the years since have striven to create their own unforgettable horror anthologies, and many indeed have succeeded. Every decade has its own standouts in the genre. Serling himself reloaded in the 1970s with Night Gallery, and people a bit younger than myself still speak affectionately of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? I’m confident that today there are thousands of American and British kids, mostly in their teens but a few maybe a bit younger, who turn off every light in the house before watching Black Mirror in deep, intent silence.

This blog at this stage however is concerned with the 1980s. We had our anthologies then too, and they were nothing to sneeze at. About the same time that I was struggling to find and later enjoying the finer titles in Tyler Elementary School’s library, I was also seeking every opportunity to be terrorized by television.

My Mom loved horror, and loved to read. The mass market paperback was made for her. She had stacks of them, usually in a brown paper grocery bag in her bedroom. Whenever she’d finish the last in a bunch, we’d walk a couple miles to a second hand bookstore to sell them and fill the bag with new ones. Whichever book she happened to be reading at any time, she’d keep on the left side of the vanity in her room. I thought they were neat because – this was the early 1980s – many of their covers had an opening that framed a face or a flame or some image, and when you opened that cover there was a second cover, and you’d see the small image you were looking at a moment ago was also part of a larger illustration. For instance, the front cover of a novel might have a drawing of a woman with red eyes, and when you opened the cover you would see the red was part of a second illustration of blood oozing from a wall.

One book cover in particular really caught my attention when I was three years old. It was summertime, so I probably found it on the vanity only a few months after having the life scared out of me by Fantasia. This cover didn’t have the “illustration behind the illustration” effect. As a matter of fact it didn’t have much of anything on it, but what was there was drawn to great effect.

ROBERTS' RULES OF HORROR

A blog about me + horror + more

Tag: Stephen King

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