Once upon a time — about 40 years ago — there were few things as terrifyingly pulpy as the books at the supermarket checkout: fat paperbacks with crazy covers and titles like Eat Them Alive, The Face That Must Die and Crabs: The Human Sacrifice. This was lowbrow stuff, and Grady Hendrix, the author of Paperbacks from Hell, has read a lot of it. His new book is an appreciation (sort of?) of horror fiction from the '70s and '80s — things like man-eating frogs, satanic sex cults and, of course, Nazi leprechauns, which, Hendrix tells me, were kind of the start of everything. "I sort of was a film guy originally, and in film there's this real tradition, going out and finding really obscure movies no one's heard about and showing them to people to sort of blow their minds, and I didn't see this happening so much with books," he says. "So I was going through a dealer's bin looking for something, you know, that would grab my attention, a place to start. And I came across The Little People by
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