Zebra Horror

Every vintage paperback horror fan knows Zebra Books. It’s strange to call Zebra paperbacks “vintage,” but I guess that’s what they are by the 25-year rule. Fact of the matter is, I’ve gotten older. The half-century mark snuck up on me. It’s difficult to comprehend that quite so many years have gone by since those halcyon days of horror.

Zebra Books stepped into the horror publishing arena in the late 1970s, then really leaned into it in the 1980s. I wasn’t able to find out exactly how many Zebra horror titles were published monthly during the height of the horror boom, but their output rivaled some of the largest publishers of their time.

The story of Zebra Books as a company is really the story of World War II vet Walter Zacharius. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, Zacharius went to New York University on the GI Bill and took classes aimed at helping him achieve his goal of becoming a New York publisher. This led to jobs at McFadden Publishing, Popular Library, and Ace News, where he invented what many SF and Western fans know as the Ace Double. He later became the owner/publisher of Lancer Books, which resurrected the works of Robert E. Howard in affordable paperback editions with now-classic covers by Frank Frazetta. After Lancer went bankrupt in 1973, Zacharius invested in Kensington Publishing for the princely sum of $67,000 (Kensington), and soon purchased Zebra Books from a small company, Grove Press. By the mid-1980s, Zebra had risen from a small, independent publishing house in New York to the 10th ranked publisher in the mass-market space, generating $40 million in sales annually (Dinger, Encylopedia.com).

With Roberta Grossman as President (the New York Times says at 29 years old she was “the youngest president of a paperback house”) Zebra grew. As a general rule, they considered manuscripts that had been rejected by other publishing houses, tapping into a lucrative romance market that was not yet fully appreciated by other houses (Dinger). They were more open to books that were rejected by other houses largely due to the fact that their advances were on the low end of the scale. Encylopedia.com says Zacharius invested more in cover art than in the books themselves, “believing that it was the cover that sold a book, not the quality of the writing inside.” They were famous for their holographic covers, which debuted on Rick Hautala’s Night Stone, and were used on many William Johnstone and Ruby Jean Jensen books as well. Focus on cover art and publishing philosophy aside, there certainly were quality horror novels published by Zebra, but many feel they were ultimately buried in an avalanche of mediocrity that hurt the reputations of legitimately good writers working for them at the time. Hautala once shared with me in an interview, “I feel as though I got little respect as a writer, mainly because many readers had little respect for Zebra as a publisher.”

Zebra stepped into the horror arena as things were heating up near the end of the 1970s, then shifted into high gear in the 1980s. They began to publish large numbers of Regency romance titles and also focused on horror, with William W. Johnstone leading the way. The list of Zebra’s other horror authors who went on to make indelible marks on horror is long: they published Joe R. Lansdale’s debut novel Act of Love; Matthew Costello’s debut Sleep Tight; Ken Greenhall’s debut Hell Hound; Brian Hodge’s debut Dark Advent; Roxanne Longstreet’s first three novels before her pseudonym went on to become the bestselling author Rachel Caine; John Shirley’s Dracula in Love; a long list of novels by J.N. Williamson, Ruby Jean Jensen, and Stephen Gresham; two Robert Bloch titles The Cunning and Mysteries of the Worm; a 4-book Weird Tales series edited by Lin Carter with original stories in the weird fiction vein; two Richard Laymon novels Midnight’s Lair and The Stake; Edward Lee’s debut novels as Philip Straker, plus his later novels Creekers and The Chosen; Bentley Little’s third novel The Summoning; plus several novels by Ronald Kelly, C. Dean Andersson, Patricia Wallace, Pat Graverson, Stephen George, Rick Hautala, Sidney Williams, Ed Gorman’s pseudonym Daniel Ransom, and Bill Crider’s pseudonym Jack MacLane.

Zebra’s horror machine slowed its production in the early 1990s, and finally stopped publishing horror under that imprint altogether in the mid-1990s. By this time, Kensington horror novels had begun to appear under the Pinnacle imprint — a company Zebra acquired in 1988.

Today, Zebra Books remain sought after by collectors in part for the authors and their importance to the history of modern horror, and in part (Zacharius would be happy to know) because of their cover art. Today, Kensington remains one of the largest and most successful independent, family-owned publishing houses in New York City, with many bestselling authors in their stable.

Below is a list of Zebra and Pinnacle horror titles courtesy of David Dodd. This could be incomplete, but looks pretty solid from my perspective. If it helps those of you who are fellow collectors, all thanks must go to Mr. Dodd.

List of Zebra Horror Titles (including Pinnacle)

The cover scans below are from my personal library, although I have been selling some to downsize. Please check out the Realms of Night eBay page with monthly horror auctions. Save us as a favorite seller for updates.

Photos of Zebra horror titles spotted in the wild are posted below the scan gallery.

Spotted in the Wild